16 results on '"Watts, Duncan J."'
Search Results
2. Cooperation in Evolving Social Networks
- Author
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Hanaki, Nobuyuki, Peterhansl, Alexander, Dodds, Peter S., and Watts, Duncan J.
- Published
- 2007
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3. The "New" Science of Networks
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Watts, Duncan J.
- Published
- 2004
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4. Small-World Networks
- Author
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Watts, Duncan J., Bramoullé, Yann, book editor, Galeotti, Andrea, book editor, and Rogers, Brian W., book editor
- Published
- 2016
- Full Text
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5. Networks, Dynamics, and the Small‐World Phenomenon 1
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Watts, Duncan J.
- Published
- 1999
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6. A Large-Scale Comparative Study of Informal Social Networks in Firms.
- Author
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Jacobs, Abigail Z. and Watts, Duncan J.
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SOCIAL networks ,EMAIL systems ,ORGANIZATIONAL sociology ,COMPARATIVE studies ,ORGANIZATIONAL structure - Abstract
Theories of organizations are sympathetic to long-standing ideas from network science that organizational networks should be regarded as multiscale and capable of displaying emergent properties. However, the historical difficulty of collecting individual-level network data for many (N ≫ 1) organizations, each of which comprises many (n ≫ 1) individuals, has hobbled efforts to develop specific, theoretically motivated hypotheses connecting micro- (i.e., individual-level) network structure with macro-organizational properties. In this paper we seek to stimulate such efforts with an exploratory analysis of a unique data set of aggregated, anonymized email data from an enterprise email system that includes 1.8 billion messages sent by 1.4 million users from 65 publicly traded U.S. firms spanning a wide range of sizes and 7 industrial sectors. We uncover wide heterogeneity among firms with respect to all measured network characteristics, and we find robust network and organizational variation as a result of size. Interestingly, we find no clear associations between organizational network structure and firm age, industry, or performance; however, we do find that centralization increases with geographical dispersion—a result that is not explained by network size. Although preliminary, these results raise new questions for organizational theory as well as new issues for collecting, processing, and interpreting digital network data. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, Special Section of Management Science: 65th Anniversary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
7. An Experimental Study of Team Size and Performance on a Complex Task.
- Author
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Mao, Andrew, Mason, Winter, Suri, Siddharth, and Watts, Duncan J.
- Subjects
TASK performance ,MANAGEMENT science ,SWARM intelligence ,COOPERATIVE research ,EMPLOYEES ,FINANCIAL crises ,PSYCHOLOGY - Abstract
The relationship between team size and productivity is a question of broad relevance across economics, psychology, and management science. For complex tasks, however, where both the potential benefits and costs of coordinated work increase with the number of workers, neither theoretical arguments nor empirical evidence consistently favor larger vs. smaller teams. Experimental findings, meanwhile, have relied on small groups and highly stylized tasks, hence are hard to generalize to realistic settings. Here we narrow the gap between real-world task complexity and experimental control, reporting results from an online experiment in which 47 teams of size ranging from n = 1 to 32 collaborated on a realistic crisis mapping task. We find that individuals in teams exerted lower overall effort than independent workers, in part by allocating their effort to less demanding (and less productive) sub-tasks; however, we also find that individuals in teams collaborated more with increasing team size. Directly comparing these competing effects, we find that the largest teams outperformed an equivalent number of independent workers, suggesting that gains to collaboration dominated losses to effort. Importantly, these teams also performed comparably to a field deployment of crisis mappers, suggesting that experiments of the type described here can help solve practical problems as well as advancing the science of collective intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2016
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
8. Long-Run Learning in Games of Cooperation.
- Author
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MASON, WINTER, SURI, SIDDHARTH, and WATTS, DUNCAN J.
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COOPERATIVE game theory ,GAME theory ,PUBLIC goods ,LEARNING ,PRISONERS - Abstract
Cooperation in repeated games has been widely studied in experimental settings; however, the duration over which players participate in such experiments is typically confined to at most hours, and often to a single game. Given that in real world settings people may have years of experience, it is natural to ask how behavior in cooperative games evolves over the long run. Here we analyze behavioral data from three distinct games involving 571 individual experiments conducted over a two-year interval. First, in the case of a standard linear public goods game we show that as players gain experience, they become less generous both on average and in particular towards the end of each game. Second, we analyze a multiplayer prisoner's dilemma where players are also allowed to make and break ties with their neighbors, finding that experienced players show an increase in cooperativeness early on in the game, but exhibit sharper "endgame" effects. Third, and finally, we analyze a collaborative search game in which players can choose to act selfishly or cooperatively, finding again that experienced players exhibit more cooperative behavior as well as sharper endgame effects. Together these results show consistent evidence of long-run learning, but also highlight directions for future theoretical work that may account for the observed direction and magnitude of the effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2014
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9. Dissecting the Spirit of Gezi: Influence vs. Selection in the Occupy Gezi Movement.
- Author
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Budak, Ceren and Watts, Duncan J.
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GEZI Park Protests, Turkey, 2013 ,PUBLIC demonstrations ,SOCIAL movements ,POLITICAL movements ,POLITICAL attitudes ,POLITICAL parties ,POLITICAL opposition - Abstract
Do social movements actively shape the opinions and attitudes of participants by bringing together diverse groups that subsequently influence one another? Ethnographic studies of the 2013 Gezi uprising seem to answer "yes," pointing to solidarity among groups that were traditionally indifferent, or even hostile, to one another. We argue that two mechanisms with differing implications may generate this observed outcome: "influence" (change in attitude caused by interacting with other participants); and "selection" (individuals who participated in the movement were generally more supportive of other groups beforehand). We tease out the relative importance of these mechanisms by constructing a panel of over 30,000 Twitter users and analyzing their support for the main Turkish opposition parties before, during, and after the movement. We find that although individuals changed in significant ways, becoming in general more supportive of the other opposition parties, those who participated in the movement were also significantly more supportive of the other parties all along. These findings suggest that both mechanisms were important, but that selection dominated. In addition to our substantive findings, our paper also makes a methodological contribution that we believe could be useful to studies of social movements and mass opinion change more generally. In contrast with traditional panel studies, which must be designed and implemented prior to the event of interest, our method relies on ex post panel construction, and hence can be used to study unanticipated or otherwise inaccessible events. We conclude that despite the well known limitations of social media, their "always on" nature and their widespread availability offer an important source of public opinion data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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- 2015
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10. Empirical Agent Based Models of Cooperation in Public Goods Games.
- Author
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WUNDER, MICHAEL, SURI, SIDDHARTH, and WATTS, DUNCAN J.
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MULTIAGENT systems ,SOCIAL interaction ,HUMAN behavior ,DATA analysis ,DYNAMICS -- Software - Abstract
The article discusses a study of empirical agent based modeling (EABM) of cooperation in public goods games. It mentions that agent-based models (ABMs), also called individual-based models or artificial adaptive agents, are popular method to investigate the dynamics of human interactions but rarely for observations of actual human behavior. In addition, the study examined data from an experimental setting where more than 150 human players played in a series of public goods games.
- Published
- 2013
11. The Structure of Online Diffusion Networks.
- Author
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Goel, Sharad, Watts, Duncan J., and Goldstein, Daniel G.
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ONLINE social networks ,INFORMATION sharing ,SOCIAL processes ,GAME theory ,BUSINESS referrals ,MICROBLOGS - Abstract
Models of networked diffusion that are motivated by analogy with the spread of infectious disease have been applied to a wide range of social and economic adoption processes, including those related to new products, ideas, norms and behaviors. However, it is unknown how accurately these models account for the empirical structure of diffusion over networks. Here we describe the diffusion patterns arising from seven online domains, ranging from communications platforms to networked games to microblogging services, each involving distinct types of content and modes of sharing. We find strikingly similar patterns across all domains. In particular, the vast majority of cascades are small, and are described by a handful of simple tree structures that terminate within one degree of an initial adopting "seed." In addition we find that structures other than these account for only a tiny fraction of total adoptions; that is, adoptions resulting from chains of referrals are extremely rare. Finally, even for the largest cascades that we observe, we find that the bulk of adoptions often takes place within one degree of a few dominant individuals. Together, these observations suggest new directions for modeling of online adoption processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2012
12. Cooperation and Contagion in Web-Based, Networked Public Goods Experiments.
- Author
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Suri, Siddharth and Watts, Duncan J.
- Subjects
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COOPERATION , *SOCIAL networks , *HYPOTHESIS , *PUBLIC goods , *PUBLIC finance - Abstract
A longstanding idea in the literature on human cooperation is that cooperation should be reinforced when conditional cooperators are more likely to interact. In the context of social networks, this idea implies that cooperation should fare better in highly clustered networks such as cliques than in networks with low clustering such as random networks. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a series of web-based experiments, in which 24 individuals played a local public goods game arranged on one of five network topologies that varied between disconnected cliques and a random regular graph. In contrast with previous theoretical work, we found that network topology had no significant effect on average contributions. This result implies either that individuals are not conditional cooperators, or else that cooperation does not benefit from positive reinforcement between connected neighbors. We then tested both of these possibilities in two subsequent series of experiments in which artificial seed players were introduced, making either full or zero contributions. First, we found that although players did generally behave like conditional cooperators, they were as likely to decrease their contributions in response to low contributing neighbors as they were to increase their contributions in response to high contributing neighbors. Second, we found that positive effects of cooperation were contagious only to direct neighbors in the network. In total we report on 113 human subjects experiments, highlighting the speed, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness of web-based experiments over those conducted in physical labs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011
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13. Identity and Search in Social Networks.
- Author
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Watts, Duncan J., Dodds, Peter Sheridan, and Newman, M. E. J.
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SOCIAL networks , *IDENTITY (Philosophical concept) - Abstract
Social networks have the surprising property of being “searchable”: Ordinary people are capable of directing messages through their network of acquaintances to reach a specific but distant target person in only a few steps. We present a model that offers an explanation of social network searchability in terms of recognizable personal Identities: sets of characteristics measured along a number of social dimensions. Our model defines a class of searchable networks and a method for searching them that may be applicable to many network search problems, including the location of data files in peer-to-peer networks, pages on the World Wide Web, and information in distributed databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2002
- Full Text
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14. Empirical Analysis of an Evolving Social Network.
- Author
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Kossinets, Gueorgi and Watts, Duncan J.
- Subjects
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SOCIAL networks , *SOCIAL groups , *CLIQUES (Sociology) , *ORGANIZATIONAL behavior , *INTERPERSONAL relations , *SOCIAL psychology , *INTERGROUP relations , *RESEARCH - Abstract
Social networks evolve over time, driven by the shared activities and affiliations of their members, by similarity of individuals' attributes, and by the closure of short network cycles. We analyzed a dynamic social network comprising 43,553 students, faculty, and staff at a large university, in which interactions between individuals are inferred from time-stamped e-mail headers recorded over one academic year and are matched with affiliations and attributes. We found that network evolution is dominated by a combination of effects arising from network topology itself and the organizational structure in which the network is embedded. In the absence of global perturbations, average network properties appear to approach an equilibrium state, whereas individual properties are unstable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2006
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15. Unraveling the Mysteries of the Connected Age.
- Author
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Watts, Duncan J.
- Subjects
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SOCIAL networks , *SEPTEMBER 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001 , *TERRORISM - Abstract
Discusses the study of social interaction and networks. Problems in understanding social networks; Impact of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. on the study of networks; Importance of the study of social networks.
- Published
- 2003
16. An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social Networks.
- Author
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Dodds, Peter Sheridan, Muhamad, Roby, and Watts, Duncan J.
- Subjects
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EMAIL , *SOCIAL groups , *PEER counseling , *SOCIAL networks - Abstract
We report on a global social-search experiment in which more than 60,000 e-mail users attempted to reach one of 18 target persons in 13 countries by forwarding messages to acquaintances. We find that successful social search is conducted primarily through intermediate to weak strength ties, does not require highly connected "hubs" to succeed, and, in contrast to unsuccessful social search, disproportionately relies on professional relationships. By accounting for the attrition of message chains, we estimate that social searches can reach their targets in a median of five to seven steps, depending on the separation of source and target, although small variations in chain lengths and participation rates generate large differences in target reachability. We conclude that although global social networks are, in principle, searchable, actual success depends sensitively on individual incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2003
- Full Text
- View/download PDF
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